"The opal is still an affordable stone compared to diamonds,"he says"and it's full of colour,light and life. I don't dream of opals but when I sit and spend up to 40 hours cleaning a pineapple opal it's a joy to see what's inside them."
Together,Dowton,48,and his wife,Sacha Sullivan,46,operate Red Earth Opal,a tourism and mining venture. Typical of White Cliffs residents,the couple reside underground as a way to combat the scorching summer heat.
Such is the volume of tourists these days - mostly from Sydney - who vie for a room at the famed Underground Motel in White Cliffs,Dowton has been operating"unprecedented"three daily,90-minute guided tours.
The hard-hat tours occur inside the cool of his opal diggings,14 metres below the surface,and where,in one section of mine wall,he has left evidence of a pineapple opal so visitors can be sure they're not a myth.
Despite White Cliffs having a photogenic and forbidding landscape that resembles a conspiracy theorist's fake lunar landing site,it has tended to exist in the shadows of its"neighbour"Lightning Ridge,near the Queensland border,447 kilometres north-west of Sydney.
Dowton and Sullivan wouldn't live anywhere but White Cliffs,even though they own a holiday house on the coast where they escape the intense summer heat when daily maximums average in the mid-30s.
Dowton says that while White Cliffs is"20 years behind Lightning Ridge"in terms of tourism recognition it's"20 years ahead"in that"we're not as commercial as it is,we're still a nice place to live". In fact White Cliffs,he says,could be"the Sedona of Australia[the Arizona tourism hub] one day."
"We've been really hammered by the number of tourists visiting here recently. It's been great but it's sure taken them a long time to discover us."
Anthony Dennis and James Brickwood travelled courtesy of Destination NSW. Seevisitnsw.com